This weekend the internet went down at the church building. Technically speaking, “System Administrator” is not in my job description, but I’m not one to punk out on my friends. I spent the day messing with modems, routers, and hubs. It still doesn’t work, but I’m a lot closer.

Sometimes worship stuff has to wait.

This is only one example of the zillions of little extra things that have come my way in the last few months. Our church has been in a crazy transition for the last year. Tons of people have left leaving tons of gaps in the ministry to be filled. I’m digging in my heals and relying on the Holy Spirit to make it all come together.

Hopefully at some point in the future we’ll reach an equilibrium where ministry vacancies will be covered and I’ll have some time to to blog about it all.

In the meantime, does anyone out there know anything about Linksys 24 port hubs?

Man, sometimes everything just goes right.

I’ve got my awesome family with me again.

I had an eye-opening voice lesson today and feel about 1000% more confident with my vocals.

I had a great lesson today with one of my guitar students - he’s working hard and almost has “One” by Metallica nailed.

We had the flippin’ sweetest band practice since I’ve been here. I’m way excited for Sunday.

I worship the best God around.

I just doesn’t get any better than this.

I received an email today from my sister-in-law who is teaching English and sharing Jesus in Hong Kong. Over the last months their church has not has a permanent place to call home. Each week the meeting place changed depending on what was available. Those who really wanted to worship the Lord with other Christians had to check the website to find out where they would meet that week.

The praise is that in May they are scheduled to have a permanent building to meet in which will open avenues for ministry that were previously closed due to their transient nature.

The whole story made me think about how dedicated someone has to be to attend a church gathering that shifts locations each week. It also made me wonder what they heck they were doing to worship God that was so intriguing that people were compelled to seek out the new location each week.

Here church is easy. We have a big building with a large sign on a major road. Parking is ample. We make coffee for you. We have people hold the door for you and pass out a folder that explains how everything works to alleviate any feelings of mystery or anxiety. We put all the words on a screen in large, readable font and often the worship leader even shouts the words out to you to encourage singing. We make every effort to keep things attractive, accessible, and amiable. Very little effort is required on your part to participate.

While I believe keeping things friendly and understandable says, “We value our guests,” sometimes I also feel like making church “too easy” says, “We don’t value dedicated Christianity.”

Is church too easy?

This weekend I moved my family down to Alabama. It rocks.

The move was relatively painless. We had many people helping us out. Even the weather seemed to cooporate. Torrential amounts of rain mysteriously seemed to stop at just the right time when we needed to load or unload the truck.

The fun part happened when we showed up to the apartment and signed our lease. We got our keys and went out to meet the small army gathered near the Uhaul that had shown up to help us move in.  We put the key in the lock, turned it, and nothing happened. We had like 20 people standing around and no access to the apartment. My resourceful buddy Tim broke in through an unlatched window and the rest of the unloading went off with out a hitch We got a new working key the next day.

I love having my family down with me. Man, I missed those girls like crazy.

Schedule’s change - it’s unavoidable.

I love when the people on my worship team call or email to let me know if they will be late or if they can’t make it to practice.

Keeping your worship pastor in the loop creates an environment of trust.

I just got back from small group.

We touched briefly on 1st John and spoke at length about writing college papers.

I absolutely loved it

Last night I played Guitar Hero III on Hard.

The other 2 times I played I couldn’t move past medium.

Thanks for the coaching Jake.

I’ve been to plead guilty to number 3 on Perry’s list. It been a long time since I’ve actually taken a day off.

I wrote this yesterday and set it to post today.

Right now I’m drinking coffee somewhere reading my Bible.

This week for Creative Chaos I’m talking about the redesign we did on our worship folder.

Tony Morgan blogged earlier this week about branding your series in front of your church. This is exactly the direction we are heading with our new design.

Note that we print all of our bulletins in house and choose to use gray scale as a means to better steward our resources. I make several versions of the graphic - color for our  large screen, website homepage, other print, etc… and black and white for the worship folder.

Old Bulletin Cover (Church Brand - Same cover used every week.)

New Bulletin Cover (Series Brand - cover will change with each series. Our current series is simply titled, “New.”)

Thank you to everyone who left comments on this post! They were very helpful. I’ve started to move past the question

Should worship be remarkable?

and started to ask

What makes a worship service remarkable?

(Although you are still welcome to add your comments here.)

As I’ve thought, conversed and prayed over this I’ve realized that in the last year there have been 2 Sunday morning experiences that I tend to talk about all the time. I asked myself, “What was different about these experiences that caused me to tell the story over and over again?”

When the answer came to me I realized that both of these services were remarkable for 2 very different reasons. I’ll tell you why in my upcoming posts.

For now,

What do you think makes worship remarkable?